To the relief of the entertainment industry, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday that a comic book publisher had the right to use fictional caricatures of rockers Johnny and Edgar Winter in a science fiction series.

The court said celebrities have the right to prevent their likenesses from being used simply to sell products, a doctrine illustrated by a 2001 ruling against an artist who sold T-shirts and lithographs with drawings of the Three Stooges. But in a unanimous decision, the justices said artists and publishers have a constitutional right to produce works that include an image, creatively transformed, of an actual person.

The comic books show "fanciful, creative characters, not pictures of the Winter brothers," observed Justice Ming Chin. He said the brothers are "merely part of the raw materials from which the comic books were synthesized" and were presented as simply "cartoon characters . . . in a larger story."

Quoting the Three Stooges ruling, Chin said that once a celebrity advances into the limelight, "the First Amendment dictates that the right to comment on,

parody, lampoon and make other expressive uses of the celebrity image must be given broad scope."

Monday's ruling overturned an appellate decision that would have opened the door to suits by people whose images are used in fiction or satire without their permission -- a prospect that sent shudders through movie studios.

Attorney Douglas Mirell, whose clients included the Motion Picture Association of America and groups of publishers, authors and booksellers, said the appellate ruling might have allowed a suit by the unwilling subject of a Hollywood "docudrama" or even an unauthorized biography.

Mirell said his clients were all "gratified by the court's affirmance of the First Amendment rights of authors to use images of celebrities in works of fiction."

Under the ruling, "it doesn't matter whether (a work is) good or bad, flattering or not flattering to the celebrity," said Michael Bergman, lawyer for DC Comics. "What matters is if it reflects a new expressive thought, whether it contributes more than a mere celebrity likeness. This is important for all forms of expression."

The 1990s comic series featured anti-hero Jonah Hex battling a series of villains, including Johnny and Edgar Autumn, white-haired half-humans, half- worms who sprout green tentacles and are shot down after two issues. The Winter brothers, white-haired, 40-year veterans of the music scene, sued after learning about the series from a fan in 1995.

The suit was dismissed by a Los Angeles judge but reinstated by the Court of Appeal, which relied on the right to control the commercial use of one's likeness, known as the right of publicity. Citing a statement in the Three Stooges case that a work containing "significant transformative elements" is not covered by the right of publicity, the appellate court said a trial was needed to determine whether the comics were enough of a parody to be "transformative."

The state's high court disagreed. "It does not matter what precise literary category the work falls into," Chin wrote, because the comics contain "significant expressive content other than (the Winters') mere likenesses."

The brothers' lawyer, Vincent Chieffo, who had argued that the comics violated their right of publicity, nevertheless insisted Monday that the ruling wasn't really a defeat. He cited a footnote leaving open the possibility of a suit for false advertising, if the brothers could show that their names were used to market the comics in a way that implied an endorsement.

"The law has been for a long time that the writer of a novel, or a cartoonist, can draw inspiration or fictionalize real people in their creative works," Chieffo said. "We never argued that you can't do that. . . . But an advertisement that Johnny and Edgar Winter are in the comics is false."